No Light, No Light
by Morithil
Summary: Blackwater. Sansa and Sandor and the space inbetween. Sansa asks for a lesson and they both learn. Rated for language and the undeniable simmering tension between these two.
1. Chapter 1

DISCLAIMER: Alas and lackaday, I do not own even a smidgeon of Game of Thrones.

NO LIGHT, NO LIGHT

The knife is at her throat before she can breath, and of the two words that come to mind she wonders which is the more damning, _please_ or _stop_.

"Come now, little bird", his voice rumbles, rolling through the blood spattered breastplate that seems incapable of holding his giant frame in and churning through her shaking body. Lady shaking melting snow from her thick coat as Winterfell looms proud behind her. Power made flesh.

"You'll have to fight harder than that if Stannis does what he's come to do"

Stannis. She'd forgotten about him, the army battering Kings Landing, the eerie green light flickering distantly from the bay. She'd forgotten so many things in the interim where his fingers met her arm and her back had met the familiar softness of her bed. It is so dark in her room. She could have sworn she'd prepared a lantern.

If he is drunk it does not show now. The only unsteady movements come from the ripple of disturbed chainmail and the wildfire chasing the grey and black of his eyes as they hold her fast.

"I don't know how to fight", she blinked back the tears. Arya would have stuck her sword through Joffrey like she had her neglected sewing needles into their Septa's pincushion. Sansa wondered how she had not wished her sister had done just that sooner. She wondered what sound Joffrey's body would have made smacking the flagstones below them had she moved quicker. She had dreamed of Lady tearing him to pieces of vermilion and velvet, but Lady was dead and her feeble hands had not deterred three hungry men out for her maidenhood on a straw covered floor. She had seen the first man's intestines drop sudden and dangling into air but what she remembered was the line of Sandor's mouth as he let the corpse fall. Resolute, grim, cold. Maybe the Stranger's mouth looked the same when he came to take you.

"No, that you don't, little bird. You sing the pretty songs they tell you to sing, and you look-"

In his silence the battle outside resurfaces on the outskirts of her mind. Somehow _that _Sansa, she that nearly killed a king, comes back, albeit fleetingly and she hears herself ask in the now deafening quiet of her room. She throws her challenge quietly.

"How do I look?" She omits the 'Ser', just as she's been told. She remembers her lessons.

His eyes change. She had forgotten their colour before, forgotten, chosen not to notice, not realized, not looked long enough to determine – it matters not. Stormcloud grey and darkening with the promise of thunder. I have seen that thunder, she thought, and it is low and rolling like the clouds and the sea churning and then men die and it is _little bird_ and _you're alright now_.

"Like spring. In this accursed fucking place"

Now her tears cease. Now she becomes so acutely aware of his weight on hers, the heat of battle and blood running high under tempered metal. The stench of death and wine and drying tears she can just make out on his mismatched cheeks. He wept as I sang the Mother's Hymn, she realized, but this is no time for an encore. Neither of us could endure a second performance. He holds her down and she forgets what his hand felt like pulling her up from the floor into air and remembers only that she_ reached_.

"Then teach me"

She was proud her voice wavered but a little. His darkened face softens at the edges, crumpling like a firm cushion clutched tight by affectionate hands. He is confused.

"To fight. Teach me to fight" Eyes wide she clarifies her request. He laughs under his breath and she holds hers at how soft the sound is up close.

"You couldn't hold a sword up if you used both hands, little bird"

Her resolve crumbling she blurts out the sorry truth of her fighting experience, "I hit the first man" she does not need to elaborate here, he knows which man she means and his face shows it as plain as day, "I hit him and it wasn't enough"

As his weight leaves the bed she releases the breath she'd been holding. Rising, he stands taller than any man she can remember seeing. That was before she'd laid eyes on his brother but the Hound's imposing height still awes her. His shadow swamps her as she sits up on the bed. She is oddly calm inside it.

"Hit me"

Dumbly, "What?"

"Hit me girl. Do your worst, I dare say I can take it"

Her first emotion is of shocked outrage. There's no reason at all for her to do something like that, "I can't- I can't hit-"

That mouth twists into a snarl, "Hit me girl, or did that little shit do you a favour in taking your father's head?"

Cold hard ground under summer snows and the smell of the pinewoods. The heart trees watch and echo _Stark, Stark_ in the crows' wake. He said he'd be merciful and something grew sharp inside me.

"I won't-"

"Hit me. You won't learn otherwise"

She is standing before she knows it, "But-"

"Little birds don't grow talons now? There's no wolf in you girl, that's plain"

She hits him. He doesn't even move.

"Harder"

"I can't-"

"You're angry now. That's good. Hit harder"

It's difficult. Her fisted hand connecting with the side of his face, the unburnt one, makes it so much harder. The burnt side of his face always looks so sad.

She tries again. He barely blinks. Then it rises inside her. There's an emptiness in his face, his stance when she hits him and she wants, needs a reaction now. His whole frame is silent and still and it was the same and not the same when Ser Meryn's fists and the flat of his blade struck her stomach and ribs over and over. Then he was silent and still and _growing_, like something was moving_ inside_ him and he didn't move at all before finally ripping his cloak off to cover her naked shoulders. She remembers again, through her tears of pain and fear he flinched, he flinched as she was struck-

Her hand sails through dark air and lands on his flesh with a definite sound. She is jubilant and unsmiling.

His head moves but his eyes never leave hers. When he turns back the blood trickles from his lip black and shining. She is horrified.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" words stream from her mouth unchecked. She flutters, hands frightened and apologetic and he thinks how much like a bird she is now, mouth open, lips atremble, the sleeves of her gown flitting about white wrists as she panics in her search for something unknown. She finds it in the pocket of her gown and Sandor forgets to stop her as delicate fingers reach upwards and she strains to dab at the cut she's opened in his lip with something torn and white.

His brain bursts to think it but she tries to remove the proof of her handiwork with the scrap of cloth he'd handed her the day the little shit showed her her father's head on a spike.

_Why why._

"I'm sorry-" the tears are back, glimmering unshed in Tully blue eyes that are like thawing ice now. The cloth falls from her shaking fingers and then it is they, not the fabric that dance quivering on his face, the ruined and the unruined cheek, soft fingertips on his heated flesh and Sandor burns anew though her hands are cool as washed linen.

She is looking at him.

His hands find her slender shoulders through the cloth of her gown while his head thinks of her waist under his hard fingers. He is not sure which of them is pushing and which is resisting. Her hands, _the Others take him_, someone stop her hands they are dancing in the air above the mockery of his lips-

_She is not safe, even here. _Sandor invents new curses to heap on his brother's corpse when that glorious day decides to finally present itself. How she can _look_.

She is looking up at him, looking in him. _Your father was a killer, your brother's a killer, your sons will be killers some day-_

"You won't hurt me"

Gods help him, but she _sees_.

"No, little bird, I won't hurt you"


	2. Chapter 2

DISCLAIMER: I own nothing, alas.

It's morning and somehow warm enough to feel the sun's heat through the canopy above. The light is near dazzling but their horse is exhausted and pushing forward another hour or so will only rob them of the poor beast sooner rather than later.

In morning sun he sits at the root of a large oak tree, crouched amid the overgrown roots like some strange predator. Sunlight flickering through the leaves casts a myriad of greens and golds over his stern countenance, dappling him in light and shadow, carpeting both the burnt and unburnt sides of his face to render them identical.

His profile is less doglike and more leonine in this light. The hair scraped back and touching his shoulders could very well be a mane, but the leaves and the sun have conspired to make him a leopard rather than a lion.

Sansa took the rare opportunity to brush out her hair, having had little opportunity to take any sort of real care over her appearance since their flight from the Eyrie. From the corner of her eye she can see him rubbing at his right arm in part-annoyance, part-discomfort, but he keeps staring out over their makeshift campsite, the smoky ruins of their hasty morning fire and trains his keen gaze over the surrounding woodland.

She will be the death of him.

Once her attention was directed to brushing out imaginary tangles he supposes she thinks are ruining her long hair _dark now, much too dark but the sunlight gives the lie to her disguise and every so often a flash of red and auburn catches the rays and pinpricks his skin into heightened awareness of her all over again._ Gods, even now, after five days hard riding and sleeping on the cold ground the outdoors afforded them she is absolutely fucking radiant. There was one complaint, after the initial first day of not talking and simply urging onwards, taking the back roads and avoiding all human contact. They'd set up for the night in a small copse and he'd thrown a blanket on the ground for her to wrap herself up in against the cold. She'd eyed it with something like the ladylike disdain he remembered of the girl who came to King's Landing all lovers in songs this and Prince Joffrey that.

"No inns?"

He'd snorted in response, "And what kind of attention do you think we'll be drawing, little bird? Me in my bloodied mail and Brother's robes and you with your court dresses?"

She'd stiffened in response, "I brought them to sell, or use as disguise. Who knows when we might need the money? And they're hardly court dresses. Wool, all of them, in earthy colours that don't court the eye", she shot him a different look, wide-eyed, "where are you sleeping?"

"Don't fret yourself about that. I'll be over here, keeping watch"

She'd given _him_ the disdainful look that time, and curled up small and fragile under the rough cloth. Don't court the eye, he'd scoffed to himself in the small hours of darkness, you'd have to be blind to not be fucking _courted_ by the sight of her in any sort of bloody dress.

"You're hurt"

He blinks, turning to her across the tiny clearing. She's stopped brushing; her hair is loose and tumbling smoothly over her shoulders and nearly to her elbows.

"Your arm. Is there, is there anything I can do?"

Riding like the Stranger himself was chasing you had its disadvantages. The night before he driven the horse at breakneck speed, disregarding the low overhanging branches and spiky gorse that brushed past. She, crouched small behind him in the saddle, arms fisted tightly in his robes and face buried in his back escaped harm. He had not been so fortunate.

The cut is nasty, he admits, but he's had far, far worse.

"Stitch it up for me, would you now? Nice work for a lady to occupy herself with"

She bristles at the title and rummages in her pack for something. The next thing he knows she's practically marching across the space between them, looking so very determined he feels the urge to laugh.

"No-one could best my needlework in Winterfell"

_Seven hells, she only means to do just that._

She kneels at his feet and unwraps a small bundle of spools, a small, clearly handmade pincushion and selects a needle with a businesslike air about her. He's about to laugh at her for carrying of all things a sewing kit with her, given the short time they had to flee in the small hours, but then she looks at the wound properly and he can almost see the colour draining from her already porcelain white face. Laughing at her now seems almost wrong. She turns away and fusses with thread.

"You'll have to wash it, first"

He obliges, but not without a snort of contempt, using water from one of their precious few skins to rinse the dried blood and dirt out as best he could. By the time he'd finished she'd threaded a needle and knotted the end of a stretch of pale thread.

He'd rolled up the sleeve of the robe, exposing the length of his arm to her. Her expression was unreadable as she took in the bulk of muscle and the vermilion stripe the cut had lashed across it. Suddenly Sandor wished he knew what she was thinking. At King's Landing her face had been an open book, wide with girlish wonder and later, terror. When he spun her round to dab at the blood running from her lip there was still underneath the surprise the remnants of a clearly murderous look intended to send Joffrey to the Stranger with along with a sharp push. Now there's something studied, schooled in her face he's not sure whether to be impressed by or suspicious of. His little bird has claws, no doubt. But the hand his arm culminates in is large enough to wrap his fingers around the entirety of her delicate throat and close the circle with nearly no effort.

She flicked her eyes up to his first as if asking permission and he lifted his arm slightly for her attention. Then she silently proceed in stitching the cut closed, small, almost minute stitches and Sandor watches in spite of himself, watches a row of them appear on his arm as neat and regimented as soldiers on parade. Then he looks at her face and sees the small, almost imperceptible knit of concentration on her lovely brow, Tully eyes dropped to focus entirely on their task, white fingers deftly looping the needle aloft and down, aloft and down in a slow, certain dance. She bites her lip when she reaches the end of the cut, loops the thread round and round again in an easy, tight knot and turns to fiddle in her bundle for something to cut the excess with.

Sansa realized with mortification that she'd neglected to pack her scissors along with the rest of her kit. _Stupid, stupid_, she berated herself, _I'm probably a horrible shade of green as it is, and now-_

Sandor was already reaching for the dagger in his boot to aid her in her task when she made an awkward motion with her head before dipping down, mouth open towards his arm. He heard rather than felt the snap of the thread severing between her teeth, but felt the warm puff of her breath on his skin as she cut the cord.

All rational thought proved somewhat difficult after that. He struggled to find words of praise for her efforts when he saw that her face was paler still. She turned hurriedly away and tied up her instruments in their cloth again. When he did speak it was in his usual gruff vernacular.

"The Others take me but I didn't think you'd actually do it, girl"

She winces at the oath and an unsteady blush creeps across her cheeks, restoring colour to her face.

"I suppose you didn't think I'd actually try to push Joffrey off the parapet"

That surprises him, and it shows in his face. Those stormcloud eyes widen and she stares when she realizes how much younger the simple alteration makes him appear. Then again she supposes the Hound hasn't had much cause to be surprised by anything or anyone. She sees his face again in the dim light, not even blinking as he opened up the man's bowels in one brutal stab, as if he knew their colour and the way they would spill out before he drew his blade. She tries to explain herself.

"That day…the day Joffrey showed me, showed me my father's head…you knew. You knew I was going to push him…"

The stern, forbidding expression returns and those eyes darken.

"Who knows what you'd have become if you had, little bird"

"You can't shield me from everything", suddenly she found herself getting angry, hot underneath her woolen riding dress, "Especially if you're not around", she added, a little petulantly for her own liking.

"You didn't come with me", he reminds her in what he likes to think is a neutral tone.

"It's not pleasant to be asked with a blade at your throat", she shoots back.

"I'm not a pleasant man", he leers in return.

Sansa stopped her fussing and dropped her hands to her lap, eyeing him with the same level of control and directness she had the night the Blackwater burned. Only this time her eyes were not wide with realization, but narrowed in scrutiny.

"No, you're not. You tell horrible truths and mock me when I find it hard to accept them. You save me from" and even now she trips over the word a little, "rape and then refuse my gratitude. You tell Joffrey to go_ fuck_ himself" _and the Stranger himself be damned but he should never have told her what he'd said to all and sundry before leaving King's Landing_, "but you stop _me_ from killing him"

"And", she continues, eyes lowered, reflective, "he would have been far worse than those men you killed. They were mad, starving and angry. Joffrey would have done it because it would have been pleasing to him"

She raises her head again and the sunlight in those blue eyes is so keen it's almost violent in the harsh light, like the glare of ice under a midday winter sun. Sapphires, he scoffs to himself, _bugger sapphires_. Tarth has nothing on the Stark jewels.

"Killing pleases me. I don't think you've forgotten that. Am I so different from your beloved prince?"

"You said it was sweet", she muses, ignoring the bait, "Isn't there anything sweeter than that?"

She's asking honestly but it's hard to think when her lips are parted like that, lips that have just _sworn_, albeit repeating words he hasn't forgotten he'd said. Anything sweeter. Oh yes.

"Aye. And it's not for the likes of me"

She looks subdued at that, and studies her hands.

"You don't frighten me like you used to. And I'm sorry I called you hateful"

There's really nothing he can say to that, so he watches dumbly as she rises and makes her way back to her side of the campfire, now a smouldering mess trailing a forlorn wisp of smoke.

"Little bird"

She looks back over her shoulder at him. He shifts uncomfortably, struggling to recall the last time the words ever left his misshapen mouth.

"-Thank you"

She turns back to face him properly.

"My name…" she bites her lip, _almost. I almost said Alayne, _"My name is Sansa", a little more forcefully, and regrets it when he looks almost chastened by what isn't a rebuke meant for him at all, "but, I don't mind little bird".


End file.
